The ‘adult’ in the room

David Gergen is a senior political analyst for CNN and has served in Republican presidential administrations. He’s now an Independent. Appearing at a Planned Parenthood luncheon in San Antonio on Wednesday, Mayor Julian Castro introduced him as the “adult” in the room among political commentators.

He lived up to the introduction on a number of issues he addressed, including the current travails of the organization to which he was speaking.

On their troubles — efforts in Texas, others states and at the national level to defund it — Gergen got it particularly right.

He explained that there have come times in the nation when Americans have been tasked with taking a side. There was the American Revolution, the Civil War and the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. In those instances, Americans were faced with the choice of whether to expand freedoms or to restrict them. They’ve chosen expansion.

He said that to undermine Planned Parenthood “is to diminish the well-being and freedom of women.” And the sides Americans are being asked to choose are “the side of restricting choice or the side of trusting and empowering women to make life decisions on their own.”

Planned Parenthood has mostly been about preventing abortion, the cause the organization’s detractors cite to attack it. And Gergen doesn’t get why the Republicans at the forefront of restricting choice don’t get this. He declared himself “distressed and disappointed. And, in Texas where the state is trying to oust Planned Parenthood clinics from a key health program based on their “affiliations,” he said, “I don’t understand why this is even an issue.”

Gergen noted that for-profit entities are allowed to form separate entities that are recognized as legally separate. Somehow, Texas is intent on ignoring this standard when it comes to the non-profit Planned Parenthood. The state argues that the separations don’t count.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Gergen said.

Texas apparently believes it can. At the moment, a federal appeals court judge has stayed a preliminary injunction placed on this ouster by a federal judge in a lower court. We await a ruling from a three-panel judge of the same appeals court, the very conservative 5th Circuit, to see if this stay will stand.

Gergen had some advice for Planned Parenthood going forward. He counseled that Planned Parenthood not become a mostly political organization in reaction to the attacks on it. The danger there is that it will be viewed as merely a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party and that this will diminish its ability to win hearts and minds. It will become just another partisan voice in a nation partisanly divided.

The other piece of advice was that Planned Parenthood start living up to the latter part of its name. That it work on helping young women become better parents. He said that some 53 percent of births now occur to unmarried women. He said this would be a natural progression for an organization that “accepts what is and tries to make it better.”